Category Archives: satire / humor

This story is second in a series of ‘travel mythologies’ that seek to blend travel writing with local mythology. Art by Jono Hunt.

Birdwatching in Budapest / Zachary Fillingham / 2013

It wasn’t easy convincing my wife to visit Budapest.

At fault were a few lingering misconceptions, most of which could trace their lineage all the way back to the Cold War. It didn’t matter that I spent the first 13 years of my life there. Budapest was simply on the wrong side of Europe. She wanted Paris or Geneva – with their plazas, cafes, book stalls, and the street corners where this or that artist famously succumbed to exposure – not the Soviet brutalism and soggy cabbage rolls of an imagined Eastern Europe.

It would be better to tell the full story: how things were when we started, and how it all fell apart. But there’s no time. They’re already here, the whole fascist troop by the sound of it, screaming orders and pounding on the door with those tiny fists. Once they break in and see the old man… Well, that’ll be the end of it.

If I were to trace the development of my addictive personality, back through the drinking, the ten years of smoking, and all the way to its earliest manifestation, I’m pretty sure the trail would end at a Sega Master System and a fourteen inch television. That was my earliest rig, where I’d chill with Alex Kidd and Wonder Boy in a semi-catatonic trance for hours on end, achieving such feats of uninterrupted ass-sitting as to give the modern standard of inactivity a run for its money. And keep in mind that in those days most kids were still wistfully playing in piles of leaves and shit, so in this I was somewhat of a trailblazer.

I wrote this while visiting Copenhagen in 2012. It was meant to be a stream-of-thought take on travel writing. But unfortunately, it turns out that my own stream of thought makes for a completely untenable travel article. If there’s ever a future attempt, I’ll try to think more about the things I did and less about inane bullshit.

This piece was written back in 2009 and it’s already dated not just by the clumsy writing but the topic as well. I mean, how cares about the War on Terror anymore? People have moved on to more important questions like ‘who do those TSA bastards think they are?’